Conventional electrographic printers use heat to fix an image formed by toner on a print medium. Conventional printers generally comprise a fixing unit that is maintained at a high temperature by a heater while printing.
When printing continuously for a long time, or a similar situation, for example, heat from the fixing unit sometimes can raise the temperature inside the printer beyond a rated temperature. In such a case, the printer interrupts printing to start cooling to lower the printer's internal temperature. When cooling starts, the internal temperature gradually lowers. Stable printing can be resumed when the printer internal temperature is below the rated temperature.
Conventionally, various techniques allow users to reduce the inconvenience of printing being interrupted by cooling.
For example, disclosed in patent reference 1 is an image-recording apparatus that execute the cooling operation (called cooing below) after ending a print job if a remaining number of pages in the job is lower than a predetermined number of pages, when it has been judged that the printer's internal temperature is higher than a predetermined temperature, while printing a job that processes a plurality of pages, interrupts the job if the remaining number of pages is higher than the predetermined number of pages, and restarts the job after cooling has been implemented.
The image-recording apparatus, by continuing to process without interruption a job having a low remaining number of pages even if a high temperature is detected while continuously processing the job, can stably print high-quality images during continuous processing thereby preventing a drop in processing performance.